It is a tepid Tuesday night at the Geylang Bazaar. The air is arid and still, typical of a June’s night in the bustling Eastern locale. The smoke-scented waft of barbecued meat and the cloying sweetness of buttery corn cups fills the air, all wrapped up in the sweat-filled stench from its largely millennial crowd. It is teeming with a farrago of flavours and people. As someone with a slightly unhealthy love affair with the indoors, constant travails in the outside world tire me. For a few fleeting seconds, I get lost in the moment.
“Lelong, lelong! 100 grams, 4 dollars. 500 grams, 18 dollars only!” The guttural voice of a dendeng salesman pierces the air and snaps me out of my inward stupor. Next to his stall, is yet another one – differently named – selling dendeng, the flavours of meat offered near identical down to the letter. The first dendeng seller pivots his body towards the second. They seemingly share a joke, based on the giant guffaw that I faintly registered through the cacophony of other sounds echoing through the crowd.
As a disciple of the Keynesian kind, the sight of two stalls selling near identical products did not sit well with me. Economists have attempted – for the best part of the last 300 years or so – to theorise the world, albeit imperfectly. In economics argot, competition in undifferentiated products (i.e. products that are identical to each other) generally leads to a lower (or, in the extreme case created by some economics models, zero economic profits) profit margin. Thus, two stalls selling dendeng at the same location can do better by expanding their product range. If one paints a portrait of what competition on these battlegrounds for profit would look like based on textbook interpretations, it certainly wouldn’t be pretty.
Yet, though market competitors, these men seemed genuinely cordial. Though it is highly likely that dendeng-buying customers will choose to purchase from only one shop, and so deprive the other of their patronage, relations between the pair radiate understanding and good-naturedness.
Thinking back, the Geylang Serai Ramadan Bazaar was a very strange place for a man to gain enlightenment. If it was, in any way, a dictum of larger thought, it was this: there is more to life than profits and “success” (often defined in relation to capitalism); social relations matter too.
Geylang Serai, therefore, makes for the most fitting of scenes.
As a person who, in big part, has been brought up in a largely “Malay” setting (customary practices, food served at home, etc.), I recoil slightly when I hear the old and rancorous ‘Malays are lazy’ diatribe. Due to a failure to meet certain narrowly defined criteria for ‘hardworking’, Malays as a whole are tossed into the indolent abyss. Badly paraphrasing Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than income per capita and total fertility rate.
Not only are such simplistic assertions reductionist and inaccurate, they become self-perpetuating. This is not meant to be an apologist essay: laziness is everywhere, not only among Malays. In fact, so pervasive is this stereotype that it has been legitimised via coinage into the phrase “the Malay problem”.
To the ardent Anglophile and people who should know better, Malay men were said to be kopi-sipping sloths who laid on their hammocks for the best part of the day, only foraging out to fish when the risk of starvation loomed large. Malay women, not to be outdone by their male counter- parts, sat at the foot of their doorsteps and engaged in banal chit-chat and gossip, while hacking away at vegetables and blobs of meat to be fashioned into more
palatable portions. Today, the typical mat or minah must by necessity own or play a guitar, rev their motorcycles at ungodly hours of the morning, chain-smoke or are of low socio-economic status.
EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY
Trawling through history, one finds evidence of the opposite. Syed Hussein Alatas’ The Myth of the Lazy Native is one such. Before European contact with the Malay world, native populations were quite engaged in long-distance trade. They could largely fend and provide for themselves. European monopolies brought a reversal of this trend. Mercantile economic practices, as was rampant at the time, destroyed local livelihoods and socially dislocated many. Once dignified merchants and traders were forced into peasantry and other forms of living cohesive to the wants of their new masters. They tilled the lands, they fished in the seas; Malay merchants camouflaged into the background like unnoticed tinnitus.
Nevertheless, they continued to thrive in their own capacities. Turnbull narrates a story of peaceful and industrious fishermen, woodcutters and connoisseurs of artisanal crafts[1]. These people chose the accompaniment of kith and kin over anonymous market transactors. They led simple, happy and wholesome lives, and largely steered clear of capitalism’s vast tentacles.
Flash forward many decades, after the ravages of the Second World War. Throughout the Malay Peninsula, fledgling states were starting to sprout. Cries for self-determination echoed loudly– efforts at independence shifted into fifth gear. Reasserting control, states reacquired land, stripping populations not only of homes, but livelihoods. Across the pond, this had especially acute implications to particular groups, especially Malays whose livelihoods were largely land-based.
The esteemed Hungarian sociologist Karl Polanyi, in his masterpiece The Great Transformation, talks about land as “only another name for nature, which is not produced by man”. One of the uses of land he alludes to in his book is what he calls “householding”, where in short, people produce for their own consumption (e.g. building a boat for personal use, growing crops for eating). Land forms an important part of his book. For those who, for long stretches of time, were accustomed to the earth for sustenance, denudation of land had disastrous effects.
Again, I would like to restate the “unapologist” intention of this exposition. I am aware of the many undesirable indices (e.g. higher relative underachievement in school, lower economic growth, etc.) out there that suggest laggard performance.
The heretics in the far corner frequently use these as ammunition. It goes without saying that we should acknowledge and remedy these issues.
Alas, I am many things. But one thing I am not is a denier of facts.
Meanwhile, I believe that these statistics may end up acting as confirmation biases, stitching together the observable (for example, more Malays relative to others in the normal technical streams) with what must be (for example, Malays are inherently lazy) into a seamless whole.
Teo You Yenn’s mightily informative This is What Inequality Looks Like, in a general way (i.e. not touching on the issue of race), addresses this. She observes a correlation between low-income and low social mobility. In other words, with less money, people are less able to escape out of the quicksand that is their economic woes.
These people tend to live in small and cramped rental flats. They live from paycheck to paycheck, one mishap away from utter ruin. Children are often diverted away from school to activities that require immediate attention, like caring for a young sibling or earning extra income. In these rental estates, lift landings tend to be plastered with messages utilising negative reinforcement that eat into the soul. Pithy messages unfurled pour encourager les autres, of the big bad Ah Long, and the life of hell that awaits the unrepentant borrower. Don’t take from them, don’t promote them – don’t, just don’t; always don’t.
Poverty becomes a vicious cycle. Left unstopped, the cycle continues.
Writing more than 70 years ago, Polanyi talks about the “embeddedness” of economic activities: namely, the extent to which economic needs are subjugated to social ones. The economy should serve people, and not the other way round. The economy is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. Instead of pillorying the “lazy” Malay (or anyone else, for that matter) with unkind and hurtful words, let us use the means at our disposal to create a better future for those who, by little fault of their own, may be victims of poor circumstance.
Let us pause and reflect, and take the time to consider why we believe the things we do, and the ideologies that seem to shape public policy. Let us rid ourselves of infectious and dogmatic beliefs that we, up to now, may unreflectively hold.
Be kind to one another, not as divorced others, but as a united people, united only by the common denominator of human race.
In a world dominated by the hegemony of neoliberal ideas, I sometimes wonder: have we lost our way? Is the pecuniary motive all that matters in this highly globalised world? What about culture, community and gotong-royong?
To reduce the substance of an entire people to certain and definite axioms is foolishness of the highest order.
Regardless of race, language or religion. ⬛
[1] Turnbull, C.M. (1977). A History of Singapore 1819-1975. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.
Abdul Hakeem Akbar Ali was formerly a Research Assistant at the Centre of Research on Islamic and Malay Affairs (RIMA). He will be pursuing his postgraduate sudies in International Political Economy at the London School of Economics this September.
